Building-Income

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On the previous New Year’s Eve, I wrote a post (How Many Books Did You Read This Year?) that detailed the number of books I read (30) in 2017. This was in follow-up to an earlier post, You Are What You Read. Personally, the latter article is one of my favorites and in it I shared my personal reading plan.

With both of those articles in my mind, I started 2018 fresh and set a reading goal for myself. I would read 52 books over the year. For those terrible with math or a calendar, that’s one book a week.

If you haven’t read the previous articles (or you just need a reminder), half the reading population in America is reading less than four books a year. That’s a sad statistic. What’s worse is that twenty-seven percent of the population admitted to not even reading one book a year. Those statistics are from a 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center.

There is a very famous quote from motivational speaker Jim Rohn that I think is appropriate here – “Education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”

If you never pick up a book, you’re not taking advantage of the opportunities to educate yourself. Even fiction books can be educational as you can familiarize yourself with new words, concepts, and perhaps even philosophies. I remember being challenged as a young man by some of the societal concepts put forward in the science fiction writings of Robert A. Heinlein.

In Stephen King’s fantastic On Writing, King mentions that he reads 70-80 books a year. Author Anthony Scarmucci (Trump: The Blue-Collar President) talks about the importance of books and admits to reading nearly sixty books a year. To get to this level, he uses audio books and listens while working out or driving.

The use of audio books has been a blind spot for me as of late. Last year, I started listening to non-fiction books and loved it. They were great and really helped accelerate my learning while I drove to/from the office. I tried a fiction book but disliked that. Non-fiction was where it was at for me. Everyone has their particular tastes, right?

Anyway, I clicked off books by reading while at home and listening to books while I drove. It was a perfect system. Then I started listening to podcasts. Oh, there are some entertaining podcasts and I quickly got distracted. I’m not kidding when I say this, but I spent weeks listening to a podcast that was dedicated to retro/vintage video gaming (The Retro Hour Podcast). After that, I got really interested with the podcast, Serial. Before I knew it, I’d forgotten all about listening to books. I’ve decided that podcasts are like TV for the ears. Greatly entertaining, but certainly distracting and not the most fulfilling.

I tracked my reading on Goodreads this year. It has a great goal feature that will update your progress. I was doing well for the first half of the year then slipped through the summer and never caught up at year’s end.

Some of my loss of reading (and blog) momentum was admittedly due to my involvement with some writing projects that took a considerable amount of my free time. The Side Hustle(which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post) is due out January 4th, Lost in Middle America and Charlie-316 are both due out later this year through Down & Out Books.

All of that sounds like an excuse, though, and I need to take full responsibility for missing my goal. I read 44 books this year. Fourteen more than last year, but eight shy of my goal.

My Latest Book!

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